Edward Hoagland’s New Novel Draws on His Own Blindness

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By Roy Hoffman

Dec. 16, 2016

IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLINDBy Edward Hoagland185 pp. Arcade Publishing. $22.99.

Sidelined from his job as a Manhattan stockbroker, separated from his wife and children in Connecticut and plagued by 20/400 vision — “My eyes are like Swiss cheese, the doctor says. I see through the holes” — 46-year-old Prescott, nicknamed Press, is the battered hero of Edward Hoagland’s quiet, emotionally complex new novel. A high-flying Harvard grad with entree to the good life of 1950s suburbia, Press is now, wings clipped, in lonesome exile among the farmers and hippies of northern Vermont in the Nixon-era ’70s. Bringing to mind the opener of Hoagland’s 1968 essay “The Courage of Turtles” — “Turtles are a kind of bird with the governor turned low” — Press has had his speed throttled almost to nil. Can he muster the courage to rev himself back to a semblance of who he was before?

Press’s damaged sight seems to have its basis in the author’s own disability. Hoagland, now in his mid-80s, the author of 24 previous books, has written about his diminishing vision before. In his 1997 essay “A Last Look Around,” he reflects on “scrambling to improvise solutions” as his sight fades. Similarly, Press, whose diagnosis is “serpiginous choroiditis,” a recurring inflammation of the retinas, concludes that “improvisation was the very essence of going blind.”

This mirroring between novelist and character is expressed in the novel’s take on a curtained world, where Press sees humans as “bipedal forms” and lusts after Carol, an artist from the nearby hippie commune, with “her shape apparitional.” A masterly nature essayist, Hoagland invests Press with a keen ear for his rural surroundings, from “the tattoo of hoot owls down at the swamp” to the “ancient bray and moan of animals” being auctioned for slaughter. Press’s musings often sound like a naturalist’s: “He wished he were blind like a bat. Echolocation would be marvelous.”

As an exploration of rising above visual impairment — “blindness . . . brought you back to basics,” Press philosophizes — this novel, in its gentle way, can be moving. But Press is in an existential funk, a state of mind often elusive to this story’s grasp. He frets about “passivity,” “claustrophobia” and becoming a “pet rock.” At the commune, an anonymous woman even engages him as a baby-maker in one of the novel’s several scenes of near-mechanical, often clunkily rendered sex.

Not sure how to connect emotionally, Press is also uncertain about where he belongs. “You’re not on Wall Street anymore,” Carol reminds him, as if he’s Dorothy blown far from Kansas. Visiting his kids in Connecticut, he longs to hear the hummingbirds on his Vermont farm; back north he ponders “the stratum of society he missed. The country clubbers of Cos Cob at their best.”

Press remains betwixt and between, a situation that provides not only the novel’s tension but also its quandary. The plot often sidles along, with scenes getting talky and the high jinks of Vietnam-era “peaceniks” and pot runners and old-time dairy farmers providing a daily swirl, leaving Press stymied in the middle. A reader, although sympathetic to Press’s plight, can grow impatient with his inaction.

Like many Americans of that era, Press hits the road, taking the passenger seat of a freewheeling friend on a wild tear across America, still hunting “a world worth living in and for.” Finding it may not be the key. At least he’s finally in motion.

“In the Country of the Blind” isn’t Hoagland’s best book, but as with Press’s journey, not to mention his creator’s searching and abundant writings over a 60-year career, it’s well worth the ride.

Roy Hoffman is the author of an essay collection, “Alabama Afternoons,” and a novel, “Come Landfall.”